Rural areas and remote territories seek to benefit from societal and technological opportunities offered by the digital economy. This workshop's objective is to define 5 new services that will enable rural areas and developing countries to fully benefit from the future of work and ensuing economic, social and cultural opportunities.

Over three sessions of market, business and technical selections, participants will vote for priority services to be developed, as well as their operational and strategic requirements. They will assess the market potential, technical feasibility and long term systemic impact through a design-thinking and human-centric methodology supported by a team of diverse entrepreneur and experts.

The workshop is facilitated by marketing and design managers with experience in multicultural, rural and developing countries. The team will provide solid market and inspiring knowledge as well as lively and creative animation to engage participants into the workshop. In particular, the team will create a competitive and interactive ambiance to foster a greater creativity among participating experts.

Format:

Other - 90 MinFormat description: Creative Workshop - several options possible depending on number of attendees

Interventions:

Culture, innovation and design - Elise Loeuille and Jean-Marc Seynhaeve
Elise and Jean-Marc will energize technical and process thinking by maintaining a creative, dynamic and engaging atmosphere throughout the workshop. They will introduce inspirational trends, guide and facilitate the findings within groups and teams, making sure individuals understand format, tools and material used. Moreover, they will ensure content and ideas are engaging and inspiring before, during and after the workshop.

Innovation and digital services in rural areas - Johanna Camp, Adrien Camp, Lucie Di Biasi
Johanna, Adrien and Lucie will present key rural and remote territories requirements and business opportunities around digital inclusion based on their personal and professional experience of innovation in French Berry. They will provide meaningful and solid datasets to shape the right economic, technical and cultural context around digital inclusion. They will work with groups and teams to outline facts, issues and ideas that move discussions forward. They will participate to shape the creative roadmap as local subject matter experts (innovation, design and communication), making sure ideas and projects are relevant to their experience before, during and after the workshop.

Technical representative (remote participant from French Berry - to be confirmed):
A technical contact will work with us to define technological boundaries in rural and remote areas, acting as a single point of contact for network, connectivity and access questions. He or she will ensure output solutions remain technologically feasible and work with the team to define the best technological framework before, during and after the workshop.

Diversity:

The team presents gender diversity (3 women and 2 men) and ensures roles and responsibilities on stage as well as in the room are dispatched regardless of gender, cultural or physical differences. With individuals living in urban, developed and connected areas in Australia as well as rural based French entrepreneurs, the team gathers a variety of cultural and professional standpoints to ignite creativity. The team gathers entrepreneurs with outstanding track records of business achievements in cultural, media, consumer electronics, telecommunications and consumer goods sectors, within rural, national and international companies. They are all first time IGF session speakers and organizers.

Introduction: Inspirational trends - the future of work in remote areas (15 min)
A video and interview based introduction to set a creative scene and engage participants in specific and concrete needs.

Breaking the ice: "the business ID" - Create a knowledge wall in pairs or in threes to introduce each other. (15 min)
They interview each other and fill out an A3 Business Cards’ template provided.
The workshop team will take a polaroid picture on arrival to stick to the template.
They introduce their colleague in the report out or stick the template in an assigned area of the space to create a knowledge wall.

Round 1: Speed thinking session - a mental map towards the future of work in remote areas (15 min)
Participants write all the words that define the future of work in 2050, with the creative challenge to generate 5 ideas per minute. They identify benefits, issues and process to create a mental map of ideas and link them to new possibilities.

Round 2: "Built a there" - Switch ideas to concrete and tangible solutions (15 min)
From Round 1, each team receives a chunk of the problem to design a the first draft of the solution/new scenario. They are asked to design the desired solution. This round will often be aimed at the “what”(ie. what we will do?) possibly also on the “how” (ie.how we will do it?) but we will push the attendees to think about the why we will move to this direction.

Round 3: "Create the gap" - Great picture of the journey to the future of work (15 min)
Split teams: each pair of teams tackles one domain, e.g. “technology”, “culture”, “competition”. One team looks at the current state of conditions in relation to that topic. The second looks at the future state conditions (they do this without knowledge of each others’ task)
Joined teams: the pair of teams is then combined and asked “to create the gaps” articulating the delta between the current and future states. Report out the gap and the future

Conclusion: Great picture of the journey to reach the target by describing the current and future state and then the actions needed to achieve the goal. (15 min)

From 50 to 100 attendees: groups of 20-30 participants will concentrate on Round 1. They will group around 3 identifiable items placed in the room and the organizing team will rotate material as the workshop proceeds. Round 2 and 3 will be treated as follow-up communications after the workshop.

Onsite Moderator:

Adrien Camp

Online Moderator:

Lucie Di Biasi

Rapporteur:

Johanna Camp

Discussion Facilitation:

The discussion will be facilitated by an inspiring and engaging workshop atmosphere and material, based on design-thinking and product development formats extensively mastered by the team. An entrepreneurial tone will trigger a creative yet bottom-line focused pace in discussions, facilitated by local subject matter experts as well as experienced and dynamic workshop professionals. By producing and using physical material combined to digital tools for remote participation, the team seeks to highlight a rich diversity of standpoints to produce a highly creative and inspiring roadmap for participants to re-use in their own projects. The discussion will include content and material shared before, during and after the workshop to engage participants in the longer term.

Online Participation:

Online participation will consist in the identification of remote stakeholders, prior to the workshop, who will be interviewed to shape inspirational trends and systemic context around digital inclusion in rural and remote areas. They will be invited to join the workshop remotely through a skype conference, and will comment and review findings along with participants throughout the workshop. Depending on the workshop format, they will participate as a jury to help select solutions. Our online moderator and the organizing team will ensure remote attendees are included in discussions by creating interactions with them before, during and after working sessions, potentially asking them to further develop one of the inspirational trends to guide participants during the workshop.